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Margaret T. Burroughs, Archivist of Black History, Dies at 95

Margaret T. Burroughs, a founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, one of the first museums devoted to black history and culture in the United States, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 95.

Her death was confirmed by her grandson Eric Toller.

Mrs. Burroughs, an artist and high school teacher, shared with her husband, Charles, an interest in history and a desire to celebrate the achievements of black Americans. In 1961, using their own collection of art and artifacts, Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs established a small museum in three rooms on the first floor of a large house they had recently bought on South Michigan Avenue. Originally called the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art, it was renamed in 1968 to honor Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the black settler considered the first permanent citizen of what would become the city of Chicago.

In the early 1970s the museum moved to its present location in a city-owned building in Washington Park, just west of the University of Chicago. Its holdings of artworks, artifacts and documents include memorabilia of the poet Langston Hughes and the sociologist and historian W.E.B. DuBois, the boxing gloves that Joe Louis wore when he won the Golden Gloves competition in 1934, and the jacket that Paul Robeson wore when performing before black troops during World War II.

“A lot of black museums have opened up, but we’re the only one that grew out of the indigenous black community,” Mrs. Burroughs told Black Enterprise magazine in 1980. “We weren’t started by anybody downtown; we were started by ordinary folks.”

Photo

Margaret T. BurroughsCredit
DuSable Museum

Margaret Taylor was born on Nov. 1, 1915, in St. Rose, La., and moved with her family to Chicago when she was a child.

She was a member of the Arts Craft Guild, a group of black artists who lived on the South Side, and she later helped found the South Side Community Art Center, whose members included Archibald Motley Jr., Marion Perkins and Margaret Danner.

In 1939 she married Bernard Goss, an artist and fellow member of the Arts Craft Guild. The marriage ended in divorce, and in 1949 she married Charles Burroughs, who died in 1994. She is survived by a son, Paul, and four grandchildren.

After earning a teaching certificate from Chicago Normal College (now Chicago State University) in 1937, she studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received a bachelor’s degree in 1944 and a master’s degree in art education in 1948. She later attended the Esmeralda Art School in Mexico City.

Mrs. Burroughs taught for more than 20 years at DuSable High School on the South Side. From 1968 to 1979 she was a professor of humanities at Kennedy-King College in Chicago. She stepped down as president of the DuSable Museum in 1986 when Mayor Harold Washington appointed her a commissioner of the Chicago Park District.

In a statement after her death, President Obama, who began his political career in Chicago, paid tribute to Mrs. Burroughs’s “contributions to American culture” and her “commitment to underserved communities through her children’s books, art workshops and community centers that both inspired and educated young people about African-American culture.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2010, on page A36 of the New York edition with the headline: Margaret T. Burroughs, 95, Archivist of Black History. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe